Phil's lack of hearing protection in recent Festool UK video productions.
- Thread starter Stephen B
- Start date
I wear hearing protection pretty much all the time I am operating loud tools, or machines, or anything else loud. I prefer it to hearing loss. A family member needed hearing aids at about 65 due to decades of work with loud stuff and no protection. After witnessing his hearing decline I am going with the protection. I also find that I concentrate on what I am doing better with it on.
However I would not say that hearing loss is quite in the same safety category as things that cause trauma.
But in either case I don't think the OP should be attacked for making the observation about the video.
Seth
However I would not say that hearing loss is quite in the same safety category as things that cause trauma.
But in either case I don't think the OP should be attacked for making the observation about the video.
Seth
SRSemenza said:
I completely agree but feel strongly that health and safety when taken to extremes is actually counter productive and can actually stop saving lives and limbs. You still have to rely on common sense to a degree. I'm sure there is a curved plot on a graph where intervention could be seen to increase safety to a point but it may well drop off when there is too much intervention and common sense is eroded.
Also the corporate approach to health and safety is often too much of an arse covering exercise and doesn't always translate to increased health and safety for the person it is ostensibly trying to protect. Just going through the motions of writing a risk assessment and method statement to protect a company from litigation doesn't necessarily protect a worker unless there is a strong desire to do that in the first instance.
I worked on a quite few tunnelling jobs on both sides of the Channel in the 90s. A lot of the guys I worked with had worked on the channel tunnel and the French had an equal if not better health and safety record than the Brits throughout the construction process. There was always far less evident health and safety on any site in France that I worked on but I never felt it was a more dangerous place to work. I actually had a lot of very nasty near misses in the UK as the culture was to push people harder for output and that will erode the effectiveness of any health and safety regime.
Having given this thread a bit more thought I'm now undecided as to whether or not Phil should be wearing ear plugs in a video. One thing I am sure of is that health and safety is always far more effective when the people implementing it have genuine compassion and empathy for the people they are trying to protect.
I apologise to the OP if my previous post was seen as an attack but I do feel strongly about this one and I have been close to being seriously injured or possibly worse on UK sites on several occasions and it didn't happen in France with less health & safety.
andy5405 said:
I have lived at that exact point on your graph. A countertop shop I worked at as the sole "cabinet guy" had just hired a new shop foreman/production manager. He talked big on safety and insisted everyone wear safety glasses at all times in "his" shop (dust masks were optional, even though they sanded solid surface with no dust collection).
I had some filler stock I needed to rip down, and proceeded to do so before I left the shop for the day. I almost always wear hearing protection (I love the QB1 bands and have stockpiled extra tips at home), I'm no big fan of glasses of any stripe. Earplugs do help me concentrate, though, and often transport me into my own little world of ultra-focus, where I don't have to listen to the endless repetition of classic rock and redneck disco that seems to be on constantly in any shop.
The new foreman spotted my lack of eyewear from the CNC controller across the shop. I just about cut my fingers off when I recoiled at the safety glasses hurled across the room onto the Unisaw in the path of my stock. I'm patient, with a long temper, but any blatant attack on my safety gets a rise out of me instantly. I pivoted the stock up off the blade and threw it in the direction the glasses came from. I shut the saw off, pulled my earplugs, and began a foul blast of logic towards the guy that was trying to improve safety by throwing things at machine operators. Naturally, he got defensive when attacked.
After we each presented our shouted arguments, it was clear that we were both simultaneously right and wrong. He was looking out for my eyes when I wasn't, but not my hands, and I was doing the inverse. We came to terms and cooled down. Ultimately, his management style was a bad fit, and after a couple weeks he was sent down the road. But he was still right; I should've been wearing safety glasses at the saw.
Maybe more on topic, I'd like to point out that if you submitted a video to this year's contest that didn't illustrate safe practices, your video was disqualified. In the interest of full disclosure, I will confess that I made a dozen or so cuts with my miter saw last weekend while wearing no PPE at all. Hell, I wasn't even wearing shoes. But I wasn't filming it as a promotion for a company valued at $400 million dollars, either.
To me, it seems like the obvious course of action is to shoot a new video with all safety equipment in place. Just correct the lapse and appreciate that someone had the right uncompromising attitude towards safety to point it out in the first place.
